


Let It Lie

by BurningTea



Category: Leverage
Genre: Eliot's stories, Gen, Hardison is his hacker self, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, a bit - Freeform, hints are worst thing he ever did
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 16:08:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7580962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hardison is sure Eliot's lying about some of the weird fights he's had in the past, so he goes looking. He isn't meaning to dig up what he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let It Lie

**Author's Note:**

> Because I just don't believe Eliot is always telling the truth about these fights, but I don't think he's outright just lying, either. Sometimes, I am sure he's just trolling them.

Hardison catches the edge of Eliot’s smile, sharp and soft at once, and something pings in his brain, some sensor beeping at him that this is not a reading he can trust.

It throws him. 

He knows Eliot keeps secrets. Hell, the man’s practically a walking Chamber of Secrets, always with something you didn’t know was there but really, really need in the moment. It’s a damn sight harder to get Eliot to open the door, though. 

Doesn’t mean he can’t trust Eliot. Not at all. He trusts Eliot with his life, and more importantly with Parker’s, but even with the fact the guy won’t open up, this time Hardison just isn’t buying it.

It might be a dud reading. Probably is. Still…

“When did you do that?” Parker asks, alert and intent from her seat on the opposite side of the table to Eliot.

“I told you, six years ago,” Eliot says, frowning. Just a hint of that growl he uses slips into his voice. 

It does what it usually does to Parker, which is to say, nothing. 

“But six years ago was when you did that thing with the lobster and the copper wire,” Parker says, and that is one Hardison missed. 

“Yeah, well a year’s a long time, Parker,” Eliot says, his frown crossing the boundary into a scowl. “People can manage more than one fight in them.”

And of course it was a fight. Of course. Hardison files away his lightning fast images of Eliot getting up to anything other than fighting that might involve copper wiring, let alone a lobster, because, a) he doesn’t need kinky shit in his brain and b) he isn’t meant to think about Eliot like that, anyway. Doesn’t think about Eliot like that. 

Anyway.

Parker smiles, with that bright, brittle edge that says she’s seeing something amusing. Hardison is allowed to admire the shape her eyes go when she does that, and the way it makes her glow. 

“Well, yeah,” Parker says, rolling her head side to side just enough her hair shifts behind her, “but you can’t have fought a lobster and a lion in one year.” Her smile widens and that’s laughter in her voice. “No-one’s that lucky.”

Eliot does that thing where he double-takes, like he can’t believe Parker’s real, even though Parker’s about the most real thing Hardison’s ever come across, and he jabs a finger into the table with each word of his reply.

“With a lobster, Parker. With… And it’s pretty damn hard to mistake a lion. It… You know what? Never mind. I was there. I know what happened.”

But no-one else is going to get the details. Hardison knows, because this is what Eliot always does. 

It’s the first time Hardison’s been almost sure Eliot’s lying. 

 

********************************

 

The second time is just a few weeks later, and he’s looking out for it now, or he’d have missed it. 

Makes him wonder what else he’s missed.

This time, Sophie throws her hands up in the air as they discuss a mark and asks the room if any man has ever willingly scaled a wall for a woman. Parker happily chimes in to announce that she did just that once, but when asked admits the woman was her. 

Eliot smirks and says he climbed a castle wall. That was on top of a cliff. And there were armed guards. 

It’s not even the most outrageous thing Eliot’s claimed he’s done, but there’s just something in the way he says it…

“Would this be while carrying a three-course meal complete with candles?” Hardison asks. 

“Like you’d know,” Eliot says, as though that’s an answer. “Go play with your goblins.”

“Hey, man, they are orcs,” Harison says. “If you’d just listen, for once, you’d remember that.”

And he loses track of his suspicions until the con is over, by which time it seems a bit late to tackle Eliot about it. Not that tackling Eliot is ever a good idea. 

 

**********************

 

“Hey, Parker,” he says. 

She bolts half-upright from where she’s lying beside him, her eyes wide, and grips the covers over his chest. 

“What? Are we being attacked? Do we need to run?”

“What? Girl, no. Settle down. Sorry, okay? We don’t got to run.”

“Oh.”

Parker flops back down, landing with her head on Hardison’s shoulder and wriggling until she’s comfortable. 

“Are you done sleeping?” she asks, like she’s just been waiting for him to give up on this boring lying down thing so they can do something more fun. 

Given she was snoring three minutes ago, Hardison isn’t buying it, but he knows she’d be up and in action-mode in seconds if he said they were getting up now. 

“No, baby,” he says, resting the tips of his fingers on her hip. “I’m sorry, all right? I was thinking and my thoughts sorta spilled over.”

“They got too big for the inside of your head,” Parker says. “Do you want to jump off something? No. Wait. Do you want to pretend to be an orc?”

It’s sweet of her to offer a solution, but he gets distracted for a whole minute at the thought of Parker and him role-playing as orcs, and has to pull his focus back.

“Nah. Nah, I’m good,” he says. “Thanks, though. Um. I was thinking about Eliot.”

Parker doesn’t seem upset to hear that her boyfriend is thinking about another man in bed.

“Oh,” she says. “Do you want to pretend to be an orc with Eliot?”

“No,” he manages, drawing the word out. “Not really what I had in mind.”

“Then what were you thinking about Eliot?” she asks, as though it’s orcs or nothing conceivable. 

“I was thinking about what he said, about climbing the castle wall.”

“Sounds fun,” Parker cuts in. “We should do that. It’ll be romantic.”

“Yeah, I’ll add it to the list,” he says, and the worrying thing is that he will, and it won’t even be the list marked ‘No. Never. Do not go near this.’ It’ll be the one where he talks himself into trying things Parker wants to do. “But do you not ever think it’s strange, all the mad crap he says he’s done?”

“That he’s done,” Parker corrects. 

“What now?”

“Not says he’s done. That he’s done. Eliot wouldn’t lie to his crew.”

If not, he’s the only one. Well, Parker doesn’t really lie to them, but Nate and Sophie have. And he’s been known to lie to mess with Eliot. Nothing serious, though. Come to think of it, the three of them, Hardison and Eliot and Parker, don’t really do the lying thing with each other, not to really lie.

“Maybe it’s not lying,” he says. “Maybe it’s more a joke.”

“A joke?” Parker shuffles a bit more, her hair tickling across Hardison’s skin, and he starts to lose interest in whether or not one Eliot Spencer is playing a weird-ass joke on them all with his tales. “Oh, I get it. Funny.”

She barks out the laugh that says she doesn’t get it, and twists herself over until she’s looking at him.

“Should we all joke like that?”

And maybe it’ll shake Eliot up some, and maybe it won’t, but either way he kind of wants to see what Parker comes up with. 

“Only if you want to, girl,” he says. 

And as she shifts again he loses interest in talking about Eliot, no matter what he might be role-playing.

 

***********************

 

When Parker drops down next to Eliot at the counter and prods him on the shoulder with two fingers, Hardison smirks at the way Eliot grumbles. He’s pretty much forgotten their nighttime conversation of a few days ago until she opens her mouth and speaks.

“I once wrestled a mammoth for a diamond,” she says. And winks.

Eliot freezes, mid-grumble, one hand caught in the act of pushing his hair back behind his ear. It’s shorter than it used to be, but he hasn’t got out of that habit. 

“What?” Eliot asks, after a pause long enough for Hardison to think through whether he could fake Parker a photo to back up her claim. 

“A mammoth.”

Parker nods to underline her words, smiling, that glint in her eyes she gets when she’s about to crack a really tough safe. 

Eliot softens, his hand completing the hair-tuck procedure and his smile quirking up one corner of his mouth.

“Oh, yeah?” he asks. “Did you win?”

Hardison isn’t sure if Parker’s thrown by Eliot playing along or by the idea she might have lost, but she stares for just long enough that Eliot shakes his head, his smile slipping away. 

“Mammoth,” he mutters, and slips off the seat, picking up the empty plate from his lunch as he goes. “Wrestled a mammoth. Of course she did.”

Parker waits until Eliot’s out of the room and frowns at Hardison.

“I don’t think he got the joke,” she says. She squints at him. “Did I do it wrong?”

“Nah, baby,” Hardison says. “That sounded just about like the kind of thing Eliot says to me.”

“That’s what I thought,” Parker says. 

They don’t see Eliot for the rest of the day, and when he does turn up the next day he stays quiet when Hardison sets him up with an in depth summary of an action film that’s just loaded with chances for the hitter to drop in some single-line anecdote. Instead, Eliot snorts and mimics Hardison’s recount, and makes them all steak.

 

*************************

 

The third time he’s sure he’s caught Eliot in a lie, Hardison’s not even looking out for it. He’s had a month or two to almost forget the whole thing, and they’re on a con in a coastal town with more rocks and gray sky than any town can need.

“It’s like a god-damn selkie upped and ate these people, I’m telling you,” Hardison says, as they skim through details of the case. “Ain’t no way this many people are going missing on a god-damn beach in the middle of nowhere.”

“Maybe they’re all going for a swim,” says Parker. “A really long swim.”

“That lasts for…? No, see, the earliest one’s been gone for four days now. You telling me you’d go on a four day swim?”

Eliot barely looks up from where he’s doing something to a bow, and why he even needs a bow Hardison doesn’t know, and it’s more by the curl in his voice that Hardison’s sensor’s ping.

“Went for a five day swim once. In a lake in Sweden.”

“Five day-? Five days in a lake?” Hardison demands. “What for? You really need to catch that one fish? What? Did it play hide and seek?”

“Something like that,” Eliot says, and even with his hair hiding most of his face, Hardison can imagine the smirk.

“Yeah. Okay. Sure. Five days in a lake. So, maybe no-one here’s getting beamed out against their will. Maybe they all just went to the Eliot school of water sports appreciation. Makes total sense. Why are we even looking into this? Hmm?”

“Hardison, get back to the reports,” Nate says, and no-one else calls Eliot out or tells him to stop making shit up. 

Sometimes, life as a genius hacker really isn’t fair.

 

**********************

 

Eliot’s image is grainy on the monitor. He slides to his knees, taking a guy’s legs out from under him as he goes and grappling another one who gets too close. He’s back on his feet, half-way across the room from where he started, when Hardison hears the click of the gun.

It’s clear Eliot’s heard it, too. Of course he has. This is Eliot. 

All the stuff he claims he’s done, and Hardison knows for a fact the guy can hear more in a gunshot than some people get out of a full file of information.

Eliot freezes, his back to the monitor, but Hardison can read the set of his shoulders, can see the way Eliot’s hands come up. That’s not normal. Normally, Eliot faced with a gun is Eliot about to have a gun he can sneer at in disgust and throw away.

“What’s happening?” Nate’s voice asks in Hardison’s ear. 

Nate will be waiting in the mark’s office, ready to spin the next step of the con, and he said he’d need confirmation Eliot had the warehouse locked down before the CEO turned up to talk. And Nate will have heard the click, too.

“Can’t talk now, Nate,” Eliot says, low and rumbling. 

A man walks out in front of Eliot, only partly visible to Hardison. He’s wearing dark clothing and there is no sign of hesitation in his body language. The gun he has trained on Eliot doesn’t waver.

“Spencer,” the man says. “It’s been a while. What was it? Amsterdam?”

There’s no sound on the monitor. It’s all coming through Eliot’s earbud, which is how Hardison can hear the hitch in Eliot’s breathing louder than he hears the words the guy holding the gun says. Whatever happened in Amsterdam, it’s apparently not something Eliot wants to be reminded of.

“You coulda stopped by any time,” Eliot says. Drawls. “I’d of got you a beer.”

“I’ll have one in your honor after I’m done here,” the man says. And shrugs. “Or in your memory.”

Shrugging was a mistake. Eliot’s halfway to him by the time he’s finished his sentence, the gun just enough off target now that the shot goes wide. Within two minutes, Eliot’s throwing the parts of the gun over his shoulder and complaining about people who grandstand. 

“Are we good?” Nate asks, and there’s no hint he was worried about Eliot. 

Hardison tells himself it’s just because Nate trusts Eliot’s skills. That’s it. 

“We’re good,” Eliot says, like he means the exact opposite, and bangs out of the warehouse with enough force that Hardison winces. 

Hardison’s heard Eliot come up against people he knows before, and he’s normally more the gleeful kind of raging. Makes him wonder what the hell happened in Amsterdam. 

 

**************************

“Nothing happened in Amsterdam,” Eliot tells them, chopping the tomatoes maybe a little faster than normal and not making eye-contact.

Sophie shares a look with Nate, who shrugs, and she leans over the counter a little more. If she isn’t careful, she’ll be in Eliot’s space and only Parker usually risks that when he’s in a genuinely bad mood. 

“We just want you to know you can talk if there’s something you need to, you know, work through,” she says.

For a moment, Hardison wonders if someone attacked Sophie during the con, when everyone was focused on Eliot not getting shot or something, and hit her head really hard so she’s forgotten who Eliot is. 

A complicated set of expressions cross Eliot’s face, and settle into an almost perfect impression of a real smile. 

“Not everyone I meet is trying to kill me,” he says. “Not all the time. You want to know what happened in Amsterdam? It was down-time. All right? You know how that place can be.”

Sophie pulls back a little, her brows pinching, but Eliot’s not done. He leans into the space she left, his eyes not matching the smile at all.

“Guy walked in on me with two hookers and some very athletic maneuvers. All right? Not the kind of thing you forget, but nothing I need to talk about. Now you gonna let me finish this or are we living on those chocolates Parker stole?”

The chocolates are long gone, Hardison knows. He also knows Eliot has never, not once in all the time he’s known him, even hinted at getting any…hired help. And the smile he was almost managing? It was the one he used when telling Parker the Easter Bunny was real and lived in Texas. 

Eliot’s lying again.

 

***************************

 

Hardison spends way longer than he meant to sitting in front of his laptop, thinking about Amsterdam and Eliot and what would make claiming to be with two hookers the better story. He thinks about when Eliot leans in to Parker’s weirder statements and runs with them, and about him claiming to have swum for five days solid or fought a lion or fought a guy with nothing but a nerf sword. 

He thinks about the difference between stretching the truth for a joke and trying to pull the truth out of shape to stop it from being seen. And he begins to search. 

 

**************************

 

Someone like Eliot stays off the radar as much as possible, but without Hardison’s level of skill some shit’s going to end up stuck on the Internet. Of course, it might take someone with Hardison’s level of skill to find it, but he finds enough. 

Far as he can tell, Eliot really did climb a castle wall, and it was on top of a cliff, but he didn’t have any romantic meal planned and there’s no hint of any woman being involved except the one who turned up dead the next morning. 

He nearly stops there. Probably, he should stop there. That’s the thing with getting so used to being able to find anything: it starts to seem normal to find everything. 

When Parker calls for him to come to bed, he shuts it all down and tells himself that’s it. No more. He knows enough of Eliot’s secrets now, and he can surely work out enough of the edges from that to not need the rest of the picture.

The information he’s found is saved as securely as he can make it, and he’s scrubbed it all clean behind him.

He almost wishes he could scrub it clean from his brain. Almost.

 

******************************

 

A week or so later, they’re out getting coffee.

It’s not even a job. They’re genuinely just getting coffee, him and Eliot, even if the official reason they’re out is to fetch some equipment they need to stock up on. There was no need to stop off in this coffee shop and order something to have in the shop, but they’ve done it anyway. 

Eliot’s playing with the edge of his mug, tapping his fingers against the rim and looking about ten seconds away from biting his lip. It’s an odd look on him, but Hardison’s been paying more attention lately. Maybe he’s projecting, because if he had live-action versions of the crap that Eliot’s done seared into his brain, he’s not sure he’d ever be able to find peace again.

He’s about a third of the way down his latte when Eliot looks up, and that’s his serious face. 

“What’s got into you, Hardison?” Eliot asks.

And, okay, great, so Eliot’s noticed. Of course Eliot’s noticed. That’s the thing about Eliot: he’s a paranoid bastard because he has to be, and he’s a great fighter, but he’s also an excellent grifter and that has it’s own kind of awareness that’s needed. Such as picking up when someone’s paying a different kind of attention to you.

“Who? Me?”

“You see anyone else sitting here called Hardison?” Eliot asks, and leans sideways just enough he can lower his voice. “Look, man. I know something’s up. You’ve been staring at me all the last three weeks. We got a problem I don’t know about?”

Three weeks? No. No, it’s not been that long that Hardison’s had all of this…this…knowledge in his head, sloshing about and trying to spill out into every conversation. Besides, he’s been playing it cool. 

“Why’d you think that?” he asks, and sees from the way Eliot narrows his eyes that it hasn’t worked.

“Do we have a problem, Hardison?”

Speaking in a measured tone of voice shouldn’t be so threatening. 

“What makes you think there’s a problem, though?” Hardison asks, aware he’s just repeating himself. “Why’d your brain go straight to ‘problem’? Maybe I’m just working out what to get you for your birthday. You ever think of that? A man can’t spend time musing on what to get another man for his birthday?”

“You look afraid,” Eliot says, skating right by the birthday present comment. “You never used to look afraid. Confused. Yeah. Startled. But not afraid. So what gives? I done something in the last month to freak you out?”

With his new habit of watching Eliot more closely, Hardison sees the thread of fear under the seemingly calm, if slightly surly, words. Eliot’s worried. Eliot’s…Eliot’s worried that he’s lost something with Hardison. Well, shit.

“Nah, man,” he says, quickly and firmly as he can. “We cool. You’ve not done anything in this last month.”

“Earlier?” Eliot asks, and for someone Hardison knows, bone deep and real, has killed people, Eliot’s looking more and more like he needs a hug. 

Not that he’d accept a hug any more than your average feral dog would, but he looks like he could do with one. 

Coffee is feeling a lot less relaxing than he’d expected it to, but he can’t let Eliot leave this conversation thinking Hardison’s been looking at him differently. Especially as, he thinks, he has been.

When he went looking for evidence of Eliot’s stories, he told himself it was so he could go to Eliot and challenge him, so he could carry on the joke, so to speak, and see how Eliot talked his way out of it. The guy plays dumb in some ways, but his mind’s as agile as his body. 

Of course, he’d known, really, he was looking for the reason Eliot lied about Amsterdam, and he knew that one was no joke. It’s just…Eliot carries a lot of crap inside that he doesn’t talk about, and Hardison wondered if it might...help, or something, if someone knew, if Eliot could talk about it. 

He didn’t expect to have trouble looking at Eliot for a few days after that. He thinks he knows, now, why Eliot told Parker not to ask about the worst thing he’d ever done. He remembers, too, the tension in the air, the slight edge of a feeling that when they walked off to deal with Moreau, Eliot might not be walking with them. And he can’t let the guy vanish because he’s decided someone on the team knows too much, that they’re scared of him.

He finds he doesn’t much like the idea of lying, though, either.

So he doesn’t.

“Okay. All right. You want the truth? The honest to God, bound by the Oath Rod truth?” he asks, and barely pauses at the flicker of irritation on Eliot’s face, because no way has he read ‘Wheel of Time’ four times like Hardison has. “Right. So, you want it, you got it. Here it is. Laying it on the line-”

“Hardison,” Eliot all but growls.

“I don’t believe all those stories you tell,” he blurts out. “The…the nerf sword and the lion and a bunch of other stuff. Just level with me, man. Are you just playing with us? This some weird-ass Eliot version of a joke?”

He sees the way Eliot’s face freezes, just for a moment, the way his eyes glaze like he’s computing what this statement means in terms of defense or attack. He sees Eliot unfreeze, sees how his brows draw together but the edges of his mouth twitch, both expressions fighting to exist at once.

“Eliot version of a joke?” he asks. “Like I can’t joke?”

The tension dissipates after that, and they end up squabbling about whether or not Eliot can tell a joke. Hardison doesn’t challenge his friend on the fact he never said one way or the other whether those stories were meant to be true. 

 

******************************

 

“How easy would it be to scoop someone’s eye out with a spoon?” Parker asks, as she’s halfway down her glass of ice-cream. 

She asks it the way most people would ask about a new activity they’re vaguely interested in trying but aren’t sure is worth the effort.

“Oh, not easy,” Hardison says. “No, baby, not easy at all.”

He shares a quick look with Sophie, who nods and adjusts a bracelet in a way which Hardison hopes to any God who’ll listen is some kind of grifter programming thing to stop the love of his life from trying out tableware on people. 

Nate barely seems to be listening, but he’s leaning back in his chair and surveying the ice-cream parlor, so he’s likely already working out the con.

Eliot snorts. 

“Taking out eyes with a spoon,” he says. He pops the cherry from his sundae into his mouth and talks around it, looking innocent and adorable and Hardison did not just think that. “Now the real challenge there is a mustard spoon.”

Parker sits forwards, her eyes wide and eager.

“You used a mustard spoon? When? How’d you do it?”

Hardison thinks Sophie would have noticed the way Eliot pauses, the way he draws in just a fraction, if she hadn’t been watching Parker instead. 

“What? Don’t be… People don’t use mustard spo- Eat your damn ice-cream.”

Which is no answer at all, and tells Hardison more than he wants to know.

 

**************************

 

The thing with the spoon? Almost sends Hardison to the bathroom to throw up. Which would wake Parker, and he doesn’t want her knowing what he’s looking into. He doesn’t want Nate or Sophie knowing what he’s looking into. He’s not even sure he wants himself knowing what he’s looking into. 

Most of all, he doesn’t want Eliot knowing what he’s looking into.

And he’d have stopped, except he’s starting to think Eliot’s been a locked box for too long, and it’s worrying him that one day the lock is going to snap. 

Hardison’s known for years how well Eliot saves other people, how well he saves them from harm. He’s thinking now about how Eliot keeps himself safe from his own memories, and wondering if he really needs to do it all alone.

 

************************

 

Parker jokes that she once stole the moon, only she replaced it with a cardboard cutout and no-one noticed. Eliot rolls his eyes and pushes her off her chair, and they’re both smiling a little bit by the time she springs back up. 

Hardison gets Eliot a coffee and pats him on the back, and pretends he doesn’t see the surprise in Eliot’s eyes.

 

************************

 

There’s no footage of Eliot fighting a lion, but someone called ‘The Lion’ turned up bloody. In about five locations. 

Hardison views Eliot with a knife in a whole different way for about three days. He’s very careful not to let Eliot realize.

 

************************

 

The thing with the copper wire does turn out to involve a lobster. That one’s tame in comparison to other shit Haridson’s run across in the last few weeks, and more leaves him marveling at how creative his crew-mate is. 

Eliot isn’t always lying. 

When people live, when he hasn’t had to take a life, he seems to be closer to what actually happened. He’s just had a very odd life.

 

************************

 

Amsterdam makes him log off and go lie in the dark, trying to get his mind to go blank. 

He thinks he gets, now, why Eliot is so protective of kids.

 

************************

 

One thing Hardison can rely on in this world is that Eliot Spencer is no good with technology. Watching him struggle to open an app his alias was meant to use on a con went a long way to washing away any lingering feelings Hardison had about the guy’s past activities. 

Hardison laughed, and mocked him, and opened the app for him remotely. 

It wasn’t the first time, either. Eliot shouted at email accounts and thumped touchscreens and printed fifty sheets once with only symbols on them that shouldn’t even have been an option. 

Which is why it’s such a shock to find Eliot sitting on the floor in front of Hardison’s monitors, one weekend when Parker’s out being Alice, and Sophie and Nate are pretending the others don’t know about the honeymoon suite they’ve booked the other end of town. He isn’t even in a chair, or leaning on the counter. He’s just…on the floor, with his knees drawn up. 

On the screens is every bit of research Hardison’s pulled together on Eliot’s stories. Which means that on the screens is account after account of times Eliot’s killed. 

“Hey, Eliot, that ain’t…”

Hardison can’t even think up an end to the sentence. He licks his lips and tries to summon something from the pit that is suddenly his mind, but the demons aren’t on call today. There’s nothing to say. 

Eliot doesn’t look at him. His gaze is fixed on the screens. 

At least, that’s what Hardison thinks, until he moves to a point where he can see Eliot’s face, and that…

“Eliot? You all right, brother?”

Eliot’s eyes are directed at the screen, but no way in any ten hells you care to name is he seeing them. 

Scanning his friend for any clue he can use to help him, Hardison sees the way Eliot’s left hand is clenched, the material of his cargo pants bunched between his fingers. His jaw is tight, his whole body tense, and Hardison isn’t sure, for the first time since he’s met him, that Eliot knows he’s there.

“Eliot? Talk to me. Come on, don’t go all radio silence.”

He circles closer, getting just out of immediate range, and drops to a crouch. He has never had to deal with Eliot like this before, and he needs Sophie here something fierce. It’s her and Eliot that keep the crew safe, one way or another. And Eliot’s on shut-down.

If he can’t get anywhere soon, he’ll have to call her, get her to come home and fix what Hardison’s done.

For now, he waits.

It must be five minutes or more, an age when all he’s doing is watching Eliot stare at what must be surround sound versions of what he’s found. Finally, Eliot shifts. It’s just a fraction, just an uncurling on his fingers and a refocusing of his eyes, but it’s as good as a green light going on. 

The guy’s voice is rasping when he speaks.

“Why?”

“Why what, man?” Hardison asks, soft and quiet, like he’s talking to a skittish animal. 

A skittish animal he knows for a fact could end him, brutally and so quickly he wouldn’t even see it coming. Somehow, that doesn’t even factor in. This is Eliot. Eliot would never hurt Hardison, and Eliot’s hurting. 

“Why would you go looking?” Eliot asks. “You wanted to know, you coulda…you coulda just asked.”

“You told Parker not to ask,” he says, but he’s not stupid. He knows that doesn’t cut it. “Look, Eliot, I wasn’t looking for this. Not at first. I was… Okay, the other day? When I said I didn’t believe your stories? That I thought they must be jokes? I was looking for that. To start with.”

Only that isn’t the truth, either, and it must show in his voice. Eliot twitches and looks further away.

“Okay. All right. So, that got me thinking, anyway. But then you lied about Amsterdam, and-”

“Amsterdam?” Eliot cuts him off, and there’s that pain again that he had when he told them about Moreau. “How-? Why would you-?”

“I could tell,” Hardison says. “And I could tell it was eating you, and I wanted to help.”

“And how did that work out for you?” Eliot asks, blankly. “’Cos I gotta say, I don’t feel all that helped, here.”

There was that time Eliot got Hardison out of car that had a bomb strapped to it. Somehow, this seems more dangerous and more delicate.

“I thought I’d be able to help,” Hardison says. “But then I saw… I found some of what… I’m sorry. All right? I scrubbed everything I found from the net, but I shoulda scrubbed this, too. I just… It was…”

“You wanted to keep proof,” Eliot says. “In case you needed it. You planning on showing the others? Show them what I’ve done? What I am?”

“What?”

The idea never even occurred to him. He’s been trying to work out whether he should say anything, yeah, but only if he thought it might help ease some of whatever goes on in Eliot’s mind. 

“Can’t see you wanting me around now you know,” Eliot says. “Can’t see you wanting me around Parker.”

And that is just about the most ridiculous thing Eliot Spencer has ever said in his hearing.

“Excuse you? Have you met Parker? Not up to me who she’s around.”

He realizes too late that isn’t the same as assuring Eliot he’s okay with them being around each other, something all too obvious in the way Eliot draws in on himself. 

“And of course I want you around Parker. She loves you. You look out for her. You think I don’t get that?”

Eliot frowns, his face creasing with it, and turns to look at Hardison for the first time. 

Hardison manages not to recoil, but only just. Eliot looks haunted.

“She…?” His mouth opens and closes a few times, and he’s so quiet when he next speaks that Hardison almost misses it. “I love her, too.” Closing his eyes, he drops his head onto his raised knees. “That’s why I should go.”

“What?” And Hardison doesn’t even care it comes out on a rising note that can only be described as a squeal. “Go? No! No, no, no. Not what’s gonna happen. You belong here. All right? This is your place. You gonna abandon your place?”

“I shouldn’t even be near any of you!”

And this is the worst he’s ever seen Eliot. Right here. In trying to find something, to understand him, Hardison’s just made it worse. He’s broken Eliot.

He speaks as firm and steady as he can.

“Your place is right here. Keeping us all safe. What I found… It just shows me some of the crap you’ve got in your head. Doesn’t change anything else. I’m sorry I didn’t just ask. I am. But you and me? Far as I’m concerned, we’re good.”

Eliot lifts his head enough his next words are clearer, but he doesn’t look at Hardison again.

“No-one can be good with this.”

“Look, I already knew you’d done some shit. That it…that you’d got blood on your hands. You said that. I just wanted to know why you were lying about some of those things you’d done, and I think I get it.”

He can see from Eliot’s body language that he’s listening, almost against his will, but listening.

“That violence, it’s a part of you, right? And you keep thinking all those…all those times, those are part of you, too. And you think that kinda thing shouldn’t be round us, so you bring it up, but you change it. Make it fun. Make it a joke. Right? So it’s safe?”

“You been reading psycho-babble, Hardison?” Eliot asks, and there’s a tiny hint of Eliot’s usual frustration in that, a slight uncurling of him that Hardison wants to grab on to.

“I been reading some,” he says, because he’s been reading anything he can find on any case which sounds even a little like what Eliot might be thinking or feeling or whatever. Breaking academic firewalls is something he’s done before, because he wanted to read the best he could find. “But am I right? Am I close?”

Eliot’s silence is answer enough. 

He sighs, finally sitting back on the floor, his spine touching the stand of the counter. 

Hardison hesitates a moment, just a moment, before joining him. He sits in silence until Eliot speaks.

“You went looking to prove I was lying about what I’ve done?” he asks. 

The ache in his voice is still there, but he’s almost hidden it. It seems whatever storm his research kicked off in Eliot’s head is rolling back.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“And that’s why Parker told me she’d been on a date with a mermaid? She joining in?”

Hardison laughs. He missed that one.

“Yeah. She wanted to tell Eliot jokes.”

“Well,” Eliot says, the corner of his mouth quirking up, “least she tried.”

“Hey, my girl can joke,” Hardison says. 

Eliot’s smile dies before it’s really there, and he rubs one hand on his leg.

“You tell her any of this?”

“No,” Hardison says. “And I don’t plan to. I really am sorry, man. And I shoulda stopped. I get that. I just… I just thought I could find a way to talk to you, that maybe you could do with someone for that.”

“I’ve got my buddies-”

“From the army, yeah. But did they all get into that line of work?”

Eliot’s silence is the answer again.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

“I’m okay with what I’ve done, Hardison,” Eliot says. “Wish I hadn’t done some of it. But I made that choice. I gotta live with it. Me. Not anyone else. Not you.”

“Yeah, well. I know now. Some. So, if you do ever…you know.”

Eliot shrugs, and it could mean anything. He knows he isn’t going to get anything else. 

“They’re not all made up,” Eliot says. “And they’re not all crap like this. I fought someone with a kid’s baseball bat once. Bright pink. That’s true. And no-one died. Plenty of what we do sounds unbelievable.”

“Yeah, but swimming for five days straight?” Hardison asks. 

Eliot sort of smile, sort of scowls.

“Yeah. All right. That one, I just went off for a swim and ran into this woman. Kinda spent that time at her place. Then I went back and the guys I was with think I’d just been off swimming.”

“And they bought that?”

Eliot shrugs again.

“They spent the five days drinking. They’d of believed anything.”

This time, the smile makes it most of the way, and stays.

“And the nerf sword?” he asks, hoping it isn’t going to switch off Eliot’s smile.

Instead, the smile grows, taking over the guy’s whole face and finally, finally reaching his eyes for real.

“That one?” Eliot asks. “That one I was just messing with you.”

 

****************************

 

Four days later, Hardison drops a packet of rice when he was trying to unpack groceries as part of a con. 

At his side, Eliot grabs the broom and taps him with it, moving him out of the way.

“Can’t even hold a bag of rice,” Eliot says. “No-one’s gonna buy you as a shop-boy.”

“Sale associate,” Hardison says, but he lets Eliot move him and take on the sweeping. “And even you have to drop things sometimes.”

Eliot pauses, pulls a face and shakes his head. The grin is familiar.

“Nah. If I ever dropped things, that time I fought a guy while juggling woulda been way less impressive.”

“Juggling?” Hardison asks. “You juggle?”

“I juggle,” Eliot says, frowning. “Swords.”

Parker’s laugh in his ear is clear as anything, and Hardison smiles. 

“Sure, Eliot,” he says. “I believe you. Thousands wouldn’t.”

There’s a fraction of a second where Eliot stills, and Hardison claps him on the shoulder, feeling Eliot’s muscles shift as he moves again. The smooth sweep of the bristles over the floor pads the air, and Eliot’s lips tug up at one corner.

“Guess you’re not like them, then,” he says. “Now get another bag of rice before I have to juggle you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Was meant to be funny. Kind of slipped.
> 
> Come say hi on tumblr. I'm [humanformdragon](http://humanformdragon.tumblr.com/).


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